


Breakwater

by standalone



Series: Fucking Political Bullshit exR Coffeeshop AU [9]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Coming Untouched, M/M, Persistence, Phone Sex, Phone Sex in Public, brief descriptions of prejudice and terrorism, hope in the face of atrocity, hopelessness, speechwriting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-29
Updated: 2018-06-29
Packaged: 2019-05-30 16:06:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15100271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/standalone/pseuds/standalone
Summary: He’s digging in the recesses of his memory for the last time he felt as fucked by the world as Lamarque looks right now, and, fortunately, as is so often the case when he revisits memories of intense emotion, there he finds the first bones of a speech. It wasn’t a great speech—it was in a bar, and he was mad and so was everyone he was talking to, and it didn’t evenwork, not like it was supposed to—but he combs through the ideas there, and finds they’re still sound. They still apply.





	Breakwater

**Author's Note:**

> Enormous thanks to [Pigs](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pigsinspaaace/pseuds/Pigsinspaaace) for the prompts. I only fully incorporated one, but you’ll find the traces of all of them echoing through here.

The senator is crying. 

It's a sight Enjolras has seen before—but rarely. For a woman like her, a woman whose only path to power in this racist sexist elitist system required the adoption of a tough demeanor and unwavering gaze, to cry is to risk exposure. So, she reserves it for the moments when no one is watching and where she really really needs it. 

Enjolras hovers at the office door. He's just arrived, first flight of the morning, at the office on Capitol Hill, and he feels like he's been awake for days. He's ready and angry and still aflame from Grantaire jacking him before dawn when he tried to leave the bed. He almost missed his plane. 

Even in abject sorrow and frustration, Lamarque doesn't hide her eyes. Open and distant, they seem to watch the far wall of her office as the tears roll down the brown slopes of her cheeks, pooling briefly in the deep wrinkles before trickling onward. 

If she knows he's here, she'll stop. Her text said “Right away,” but he can give her a minute. He turns to lead back to the reception area and staff desks, but she hears his footstep on the soft beige carpeting. 

"That you, Enjolras?" Her voice is cracked and low. 

"Good morning, Senator."

"This is bad."

He nods, already flipping his laptop open as he enters the room and settles in one of the elegantly carved guest chairs. 

"No, not yet," she waves at the computer. Pulling a tissue from a box in one of her desk drawers, Lamarque noisily blows her nose. "I need to talk this out first. With no records. This is not a thing to spin. It's a disaster."

“One of many,” Enjolras agrees.

“But a bigger one. No; not bigger exactly. More decisive. More _lasting_.” She wads the tissue in her hand. “You know how excited I was in ’81 when O’Connor was appointed? I was still in City Hall then.” She laughs quietly. “I was too excited. I knew she’d be terrible. But a terrible woman, at least, in a place so long held exclusively by terrible men. And then. God. Thomas, that wretch. But then we got Ginsburg, and Sotomayor, and Kagan, and things seemed less desperate.” The breath she lets out is long and uneven. “Today, Enjolras, I feel desperate.”

He’s been writing non-stop the last few weeks, fundraising letters and speeches and petitions and screeds against the panoply of abuses, but particularly she’s had him writing about children. Lamarque’s desk photo catches his eye—her with her extended family, her kids and their spouses and the wiggly little grandchildren. He’s been looking at kids differently. It’s not just him, is it? He imagines that parents on the street grip their kids’ hands tighter in the crowd, that their hugs are imbued with a new awareness of loss. It’s one thing when it’s on the other side of the world, a foreign power that feels beyond him; but this is _here_ , his government ripping children from their parents, and he’s not quite sure what to do with the powerlessness and fear and revulsion this makes him feel. Except write. And thank god, Lamarque needs him to write.

“The courts are supposed to be our last line of defense, the thing that protects us when nothing else can.” Tossing the tissue into the garbage, she leans forward to look Enjolras dead in the face. This is Lamarque’s tell. This is when you get past the barricades. “It’s all arbitrary. All of this. Democracy is an awful system, because a group of people, given power, loses its moral compass.”

The wall behind him, he’s forgotten, is stenciled with two words, each a foot tall, pure black on the cream of the wall: TOWARD JUSTICE.

Like King, Enjolras knows, Lamarque believes in a divine righteousness. She believes there will be justice somewhere, someday. Enjolras cannot share this conviction, but he envies and admires it, even if _someday_ ’s not helping her feel better about today.

He’s digging in the recesses of his memory for the last time he felt as fucked by the world as Lamarque looks right now, and, fortunately, as is so often the case when he revisits memories of intense emotion, there he finds the first bones of a speech. It wasn’t a great speech—it was [in a bar](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9979466), and he was mad and so was everyone he was talking to, and it didn’t even _work_ , not like it was supposed to—but he combs through the ideas there, and finds they’re still sound. They still apply.

“It’s because of the progress,” he says, “isn’t it?”

She tilts her head toward him in the way that means _Go on_.

“In your work, in your _life_ , you’ve seen so much get better.” She was born to a country that was railing against _Brown v. Board_ , in a city where strangers burned crosses on her neighbor’s lawn, in a community where no one expected her to graduate high school, much less college. He’s written about all of this, and a thousand other impediments, in his career with her. “And that upward motion, well, it’s felt like things were moving, you know—” he hooks a thumb over his shoulder—“the right direction. Like that. But now it’s atrocity piled on indignity piled on insult, and it feels like everything’s being undone.”

The senator nods.

“But Senator. You’ve said it to me a million times. The only thing that ever makes anything better is hope. Not hope on its own. But hope with plans, hope rooted in justice, hope with millions at its back, Senator. That’s what’s made it. That’s what you’ve brought. Why you’re here. What the people need from you.

“We don’t need a light in the darkness. We want it, sure. But what we need is someone out there calling our name, someone reminding us that even when they can’t see us, they won’t forget we’re there.”

Her brain is clicking along far ahead of Enjolras’s, and he knows how it works—she’s not quite hearing his words anymore but he needs to keep talking till she says something so that no sudden silence will interrupt the progress of her thoughts. He’s saying something more, something vague about recognition and need, when Lamarque holds up a hand.

“‘ _We see_ ,’” she says. “Let’s build around that. ‘ _We see_ ,’ and we can call out all the whos and the whats—the people behind the wheels of law and order and progress, and the people getting run over.”

—

Washington, D.C., in summer isn’t for everyone, but Enjolras—maybe because he doesn’t live there, and because his visits there are always associated, in his mind, with Getting Shit Done—kind of loves it. Saying goodnight to a few of his favorite Capitol colleagues after a wine-drenched dinner, he ambles back out into the sweltering evening toward his hotel. He wears a full suit when he visits the Washington office; you never know who else may need to drop in to see the senator, and appearances matter. It’s also fucking freezing in all the office buildings.

It’s muggy and warm and still light out, and he’s not eager to return to the air-conditioned sterility of his room, so he settles on a park bench, removes his jacket, cuffs his shirt sleeves, and pulls out his phone.

Grantaire picks up on the first ring. “I was about to text you!”

“Is everything okay?”

“That’s what I was typing! See?” There’s the sound of a text sending from Grantaire’s phone, and then Enjolras’s phone buzzes. 

**Grantaire:** You good?

Enjolras laughs. The air is really beautiful here, he thinks, the way it sticks to you like it loves you.

“I love you,” he says to Grantaire.

“Are you drunk?”

This, while an insulting insinuation, is not entirely off-base. “Maybe.”

“Did you go out with Kristen again?”

“And Chida and Darren.” His D.C. people eat fast, talk fast, drink fast—often all at once. “A wine and small plates kind of place. They did this thing with crispy potatoes and some kind of a sauce that was kind of like that sauce your mom makes?”

“The green stuff? Sahawiq? I told you, that shit goes on everything.”

“It was really good.” He still tastes it on the back of his tongue, along with the sweet white wine the restaurant had served alongside to balance its spiciness. “How was work?”

“Good. Research day, mostly. I kind of fell down a rabbit hole of poppies.”

“Poppies?”

“Yeah, I mean, they’re kind of a potent antiwar symbol, obviously, from the whole [Flanders fields](https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/flanders-fields) thing, which is why the [Tower of London poppies](https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/mar/05/how-we-made-tower-of-london-poppies-paul-cummins-tom-piper) happened a couple years ago, but I was wondering why I haven’t seen more poppies as protest iconography against the opioid crisis, and then, well, you know. Then it was like three hours later and I know a shitload about poppies.”

Enjolras could listen to this Grantaire voice for hours on end—the version of Grantaire that’s able to own his own curiosity and insights without shame, that’s able to see his own thoughts as worthwhile ends. Thank god Grantaire got this job with people smart enough to appreciate how he looks at the world.

“I ever tell you about the time I saw the poppies? The real ones?” Hearing no answer, Grantaire keeps going. “You know, when we first came over, how we were in LA for a hot minute? And our sponsors there from the mosque, they were actually pretty cool, they wanted us to see _American_ shit, so they took us places all the time on the weekends. And one time we went to this [wildflower reserve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antelope_Valley_California_Poppy_Reserve). I barely remember it. Like, I’m not sure if I’ve ever talked about it, even, since then. 

“But this place, Enj, it all stayed with me. It’s incredible. It’s fucking _garish_ —these hillsides completely, totally, bright orange, everywhere you can see. It makes Earth feel foreign. Like some planet in a crappy ’70s sci-fi flick. And then you get close, and it’s just flowers. Just an inch or two across, each. But so many of them. I couldn’t have been more than eight or so, but I distinctly remember holding one in my hand and that the petals were so smooth, and looking at the tiny white lines inside thinking, _this one’s different from every single other poppy here_ , and blowing my own eight-year-old mind.”

Grantaire is so good at seeing things. Enjolras wants to burst open into this night sky, love and the satisfaction of _having_ him exploding forth from his chest like signal flares. “God, I love you.”

“Yeah?” He can hear Grantaire smiling about this. “Why?”

“I was thinking about how you see things. People. How you see _me_ ,” he says. “Lamarque and I, we were planning out the Congresswoman's next campaign—social media, press releases, speeches.” She’s a shoo-in for reelection in November, but she still has to look like she’s trying, like she still _wants_ it. “You’ve always been so good at seeing what other people need. What I need.”

“Is that what I do?” Now he’s smirking.

“From the first time you saw me.”

“Maybe it’s just that what you _need_ —” Grantaire draws out the word, so that no one can miss the back-room blow-job allusions—“happens to also be what I want.”

“Maybe. But you. You made this life I’m living _happen_.” It’s too compact a way to say all the things that he needs to figure out, someday, how to say better: that Grantaire’s intercessions in his life have not _changed_ him so much as they’ve made him realize the possibilities of what he, and his life, and his world, can be.

“How about how you see me?” Grantaire asks. “Could you see me, for example, yanking your pants down and blowing you in a storeroom?”

“Yeah,” Enjolras says, remembering. “Obviously. Now. I mean, you _have_.” But before, he couldn’t have. Before, he would’ve said _no, I’m not that kind of guy._ It turns out he’s a lot more types than he knew. He’d never guessed there were so many untried ways he could be himself. 

“And in closets and rooftops and your bed, and my bed, and _our bed_. But I don’t think we’ve ever fucked in a hotel room.” The higher note in Grantaire’s voice finally clues Enjolras in about where this is going. Past philosophical reflection, it’s time to talk about fucking.

“I’m not in the hotel,” he says, keeping his own tone pleasant and informative.

“Ooh.”

“I’m on a park bench.”

“Better.” He can hear Grantaire grinning. He loves the way Grantaire’s teeth flash, for just a second, a tease of teeth, when he smiles that way. “Want to know where I am?”

“Yeah.”

“Musain, back corner. Quiet night here. But I just finished my beer, and I’m gonna walk home now. And by the time I get there...”

“Yeah?”

“By the time I get there, I’m gonna be ready to come.” The connections between his ear and mind and chest and groin all twist into pulsing awareness. “So are you.”

This kind of incentive could drive Enjolras into the most frigidly colorless of hotel rooms.

“Then I should probably—”

“Nope. Listen. I’m going to talk to you, and you don’t get to move off that bench.”

“No?” Halfway to standing, Enjolras sits back down, shifting to get more comfortable on the bench; his legs splay, feet in their slim shoes settling flat and far from one another on the pavement. No one was trying to share his bench anyway, not at this time of evening, when so many others are clear, so he’s not embarrassed to take up space.

He hears the scrape of a chair at the other end, and Grantaire calling bye to Musichetta, and her saying something back, and Grantaire’s muted laughter.

“Okay. So, I’m walking down the street in D.C., and it’s still hot as fuck even though it’s starting to get dark out. Yeah?”

“Mm-hmm.” Enjolras smiles. Grantaire always tracks the weather when Enjolras is out of town.

“And then I slow down, not sure why, and I see it’s ’cause on this bench, there’s this _guy_. Hair’s a mess, these blond curls all over the place, but the rest of him looks pretty put-together, slung out on that bench, arm stretched out across the back like he’s saving that spot for someone.”

Enjolras looks at his right arm, the one that’s not holding the phone to his ear, and sure enough, it reaches away from him down the back of the bench. He lets his thumb slide possessively over the wooden slat.

“Are you in the gray suit?”

“The dark blue one.”

“Ooh.” Grantaire’s thinking this over. “The Young Republican. So I sit—”

“Fuck you. It looks fine.”

“ _No one_ disputes that, Enjolras.” His voice is hazy with mirth. “I am fantasizing about fucking you in it while you are but a stranger to me. Trust that I think it looks fine, and also, not separately, looks like what a Young Republican wears from dawn till dusk every single day of his life.”

A year and a half in, Grantaire still knows which remarks make Enjolras all prickly, and exploits that knowledge on the regular.

“So I slide in next to you. I don’t say anything.”

“Ha!” Enjolras says.

“Neither do you,” Grantaire says pointedly. “I look around, and even though there’s lots of people out, most of them are busy, walking home or whatever. No one’s going to notice.” On the far side of a broad walkway, a couple make out on another bench; further down, a group of teenagers yell friendly insults at each other as they roll dice under a tree. “I look at you, and your eyes are on fire, and I don’t even care about your politics right now, I stick my hand on your dick and—”

“Oomph.” The blue suit trousers are always snug; they’re meant to be, and they make Enjolras’s legs into handsome sticks, Jehan says, but as such, they are not accommodating of an increase in blood flow or content size.

“You like that, don’t you? This stranger, holding you by the dick in a public fucking park while other strangers walk by you with no idea, and you’re just looking out at the trees tryna act normal, like some asshole’s not teasing the underside of your cock with one finger, up and down, teasing you till you start to moan.”

It’s just his zipper, and the stiff cloth around it, not Grantaire’s hand. That’s ridiculous. But when Grantaire describes a finger stroking him, Enjolras could swear it’s there, running along the erect, taut length of his cock through his pants. “Jesus, R.”

“And then I lean toward you, conversational style. ‘How’s it going, man? Big bench fan? Whatcha got going on under these fancy pants? Where do you stand on BJs?’”

The voice in his ear is low and light, underlined by the clomp of Grantaire’s feet on the sidewalk. Grantaire is just walking home, he recalls, arching delicately against the sturdy fabric of his underwear, hoping that to anyone watching, this just looks like a casual stretch. Grantaire has always been so good at making the outlandish seem reasonable.

“And I start whispering into your ear about how I’d be going down on you if we weren’t in a public place right now, about my tongue getting you wet, sucking you in—”

“Wait,” Enjolras gasps, clutching at the bench and grasping for steadiness in his voice. No one’s looking, right? His cock is clearly outlined through the close-fitting blue flat-fronts, hard and twitching, his pants providing friction, and he’s buying Grantaire’s story, he really is; so long as he keeps looking across the gravel walkways and spreading lawns, his mind’s well on its way to believing that Grantaire really is right there, gripping him, getting him off while he murmurs fantasies in his ear. “Are we— Are you— How many layers deep does this story go?”

“As many as it needs, man,” Grantaire says, in this deliberately measured, sultry, talking-to-a-stranger voice. “You can go as deep as you want.” There’s a rattle of keys, and the familiar sound of their door opening and closing, and then Grantaire’s tone gains urgency. “So I’m whispering about you in my mouth and just curving my hand around you, like that? You feel that?” He feels it. He does. The pressure on his cock is at once firm and inadequate. “And since no one’s watching us—fuck it, no, someone’s definitely watching. Who, Enj? Tell me who’s watching us.”

A little way away, on an intersecting path, a uniformed police officer has drawn up short to check something on his phone. His eyes flit up from the screen, then back to it, then up again in another direction.

“Badge at two o’clock. Got an eye on us.”

“They hot?”

“Meh. Tall, skinny white guy.”

“Not your type. But maybe mine?” The thought adds to the heat in Enjolras’s guts. Grantaire would never. But nonetheless, his phantom Grantaire’s now eyeballing the cop, and that makes Enjolras want to grip every Grantaire to his chest and not let go. “I know he’s watching, and I’m gonna make sure he knows you’re with me, so I lick your ear. Just a little, at the end, and he’s probably far enough he can’t see the deets, right? My thumb’s on the end of your cock, and when I lick your ear, I’m just tapping a little, right at the end.”

Enjolras’s open ear tingles. “Mmmm,” he grunts, very quietly, lifting the phone closer to the other.

“You’re getting wet, aren’t you?” He is. Grantaire chuckles, low. “If we were somewhere private, somewhere I could pull those pants off, I’d be rubbing my thumb right in that, using it to jack you.” In fact, that’s exactly what Grantaire did this morning, his fingers, silky with the liquid pooling at the tip of Enjolras’s cock, sliding tight up and down the sensitive flaring out of the head till Enjolras shuddered and swore and shot jizz all over the hair of Grantaire’s chest. “But we’re in public. 5-0’s watching. So I’m just gonna...” Something clanks and rustles at the other end, and then there’s the soft slapping sound of Grantaire’s hand moving up and down his own cock. “I’m just gonna swing my legs up— _unhhh_ —so they’re right in your, in your lap, and my hand doesn’t have to do anything anymore—”

Enjolras lets out an involuntary moan. He loves Grantaire’s hands on him; even in imagination, their departure is a loss.

“Oh, you miss that, huh? Well, maybe I’ll keep that thumb there. Maybe even, if you do a good enough job thrusting up against the side of my thigh, where no one can see what’s happening, maybe even let that thumb slide down the front, behind your belt, so the one place I’m actually touching you is slick as fuck.”

Enjolras is straining up into it, letting his mind turn the tight press of his underwear into Grantaire’s meaty thigh, the unyielding line of his leather belt Grantaire’s thumb flicking over his tip every time he thrusts up. Except he’s not thrusting; he’s in a public park. That’s, at the very least, a lewd act. He’s in the nation’s capitol, right-hand man to one of the country’s greatest public servants; he can’t afford public lewdness. So he’s just sitting here, maybe wriggling a little, maybe holding the plank under his hands too hard, like he’s working his fingers into the sinewy holds of a muscled human shoulder. 

“The police can’t take his eyes off,” Grantaire breathes. “He's thinking you're just his type. Everywhere, you’re in control. Tidy. Gorgeous. Except the part he can’t see, the part he wants to see: you, hard, getting it. Getting off.” Grantaire’s voice is building inside him, resonating and amplifying, filling him up. “You’re so close, aren’t you?” On the other end, Enjolras is like 93% sure, Grantaire is looking at some picture of him, imagining him, as his own cock swells in the pull of his capable grip. “I’m leaning in again, Enj, and I’m talking right in your ear.” Grantaire is talking right in his ear. “Come for your country, stranger.” Let no one see the obscenity of Enjolras’s pants right now, the way the thick curve of the cock, making miniscule wriggles up and down the central seam, deforms their slender lines. “No one knows. You’re hiding it from everyone except me. I’m licking your fucking tragus. No one else in the world knows how fucking good it feels to be in your body right now. Come for me.”

Thank god for the underwear that will, he hopes, prevent his staining the inside of his best summer suit. “Grantaire,” he croaks, and trusts the instability of his voice to communicate what he cannot, in this public space, yell. 

“Fuck yeah,” grunts Grantaire. “Oh fuck, Enj. Fuck. Ohhhhh fuck. I’m fucking coming. You’re with me. Right?”

“Yeah,” manages Enjolras, as the first jolt of come surges out. 

“Fuuuuuuck.”

He lets the waves of it crash over him. He’s coming all over himself, but no one sees, no one knows; he’s just another ignorable, unremarkable one of the thousands of people out in this busy city tonight.

“Grantaire,” he says again, after some time. The damp stickiness in his pants increases his awareness that he’s damp and sticky everywhere, and that night’s coming on.

The encroaching dark flings filmy sheathes over the foliage, darkening it too. "I should go, Grantaire."

“Get up,” Grantaire says. “Gather your things, and walk back to the hotel like nothing. Like this is just a normal thing you do.”

“Isn’t it?” Enjolras asks. He likes when Grantaire tells him what to do. Usually it’s teasing or uncertain insistence or persuasion—and he likes those too, a whole fucking _lot_ —but sometimes Grantaire does boss him around.

Grantaire’s laughing at him, round and full.

Enjolras picks up his bag and jacket. “A thing doesn’t have to happen every day to be normal.”

“Doesn’t that make _normal_ kind of meaningless?”

“Just broadens the category.” Standing up is actually not that uncomfortable. He glances back at the park bench, imagining himself there, coming—imagining Grantaire imagining it—and clicks into the camera app to take a photo before he walks away.

As he nears the hotel, he says, “I’d better go. I have some stuff I should write before—”

“Well, _yeah_ ,” Grantaire says like Enjolras’s busyness is a given, like hunched-over typing at the polished cherry-veneer hotel-room desk is a noble calling. “It’s not like you’re gonna save the world talking to me.”

 _Or at all._ “It’s funny,” he says, pushing into the shocking cold of the revolving door, “I know you think, even more than I do, that all this shit moves too slow, that the system’s rigged, that democracy’s a game we’re losing.” He remembers Lamarque this morning, her despair. “But you... you’re the only reason I’m able to stay in it.”

—

“ _We see you, young parents, undereducated and overworked, struggling to make a better life for your families. I was one of you. I know that the presence of opportunity is no guarantee, and that an opportunity that won’t make room for your life is... is..._ ” Lamarque drums her fingers on the desk and looks to Enjolras, whose fingers are clattering on the keys.

“ _Is no opportunity at all, but an insult_.”

“Good.”

“I’m thinking instead of ‘ _to make a better life_ ,’ something about seeing beyond the day-to-day?”

“Mm-hmm. The power to dream. Aspiration.”

“Maybe, _‘parents whose greatest dream is that someday it won’t be such a struggle_.'”

She tilts her head noncommittally. He’ll let it stand for now. There’s still time for an agonizing profusion of edits before [tomorrow](https://act.moveon.org/event/families-belong-together_attend1/search/)’s rallies.

“ _We see you, people fleeing terror and violence, and we know that laws are hard, but that no law can sanction the separation of your families at our borders_.”

“We should change ‘hard’ later,” Enjolras says, tagging it. Too controversial, distracting, vague. The wrong kind of vague, the kind that would give her detractors the wrong kind of fodder. 

“Yep. _We see—_ ” Stern and hard-faced, her warm eyes glare at the words over his shoulder. “Enjolras. What will all this listing do?”

“A lot,” he says, pausing to look up from his screen. Politicians spend such a massive majority of their time appealing to whatever they’ve defined as “the middle”—the moderates, the okay-with-how-things-are, the voice of the people. But the people have hundreds of millions of voices, and while it may be politically expedient to reach for the group most centrally-aligned in its philosophy, this only works if we’re willing to forget that we’re all edge cases sometimes, in some ways. We all have our own numberless variances; maybe we could all, if the winds blow right, end up getting off, alone, in a nice suit in the green fecundity of a public park at dusk. If the winds blow right, we could find ourselves venturing timidly through a strange hot wasteland with only desperate love to guide us, reliant on our kids’ tenacity and the possible—god, please, let it be possible—tolerance of strangers. “It makes people know that to you, the life they’re living, and however they feel about it, is real. You see them. They’re not being gaslit; they’re not invisible.”

“And what good does that do?” He misses this, when they’re in different states—the senator’s challenges are brighter in person, more encouraging. It’s not doubt, but regard: she insists on understanding his motivations so she can weigh them against her own.

“Being seen doesn’t mean you get helped,” Enjolras admits. “But no one can do anything for you if they won't acknowledge you’re _there_.”


End file.
